Bill Kristol, editor of the consistently unprofitable neocon redoubt Weekly Standard, told the wife of the former chairman of the Federal Reserve he is on the lookout for an “insurgent” to counterpose Donald Trump.

Making the corporate media rounds on Thursday, Kristol told CNN his hope is on freshman Sen. Ben Sasse, a near nobody from Nebraska who went to Yale and Harvard and majored in government.

“I hope Ben Sasse decides to pick up the mantle himself. I think it would be fantastic to have a young, charismatic, conservative, but very independent-minded and willing to work across the aisle senator on the stage with two elderly Americans: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,” said Kristol.

Sasse is a central character in the #NeverTrump movement. He went on Facebook Wednesday and posted “An Open Letter to Majority America” calling for a third party candidate.

Sasse writes that there “are dumpster fires in my town more popular” than Trump and Clinton. He then rolls out the standard “conservative” fare in support of the national security state.

At the top of the list—and undoubtedly to Bill Kristol’s delight—is a “national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad.” This is followed by “honest” entitlement reform “so that we stop stealing from future generations” (budget “reform,” at least from cookie-cutter conservatives, never includes the untouchable $718 billion spent on an absurdly bloated military or doled out for “international security assistance,” in other words bribing dictators and psychopaths to do the bidding of empire).

Mr. Sasse, of course, has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting anywhere near the White House and Bill Kristol knows it.

Kristol is merely making public to a diminishing number of CNN and MSNBC spectators his discomfiture with Trump and Clinton (although a number of his neocon pals, horrified by Trump, have stated they will cross the supposed ideological divide and vote for Clinton, thus demonstrating there is faint substantial difference between Republicans and Democrats).

The neocon faction, sidelined during the reign of Obama (who lacked, according to the neocons, the required enthusiasm for bombing small countries), is attempting to once again emerge from the slime of think thanks and back rooms at the Council on Foreign Relations and climb into command posts at the State Department and the Pentagon.